Calls to eradicate coca fields in the Peruvian Andes began a century ago as part of a mission civilisatrice led by eugenicist Enrique Paz Soldán, long before concern over cocaine and the subsequent United States-abetted drug war. “If we await with folded arms a divine miracle to free our Indigenous population from the deteriorating action of coca, we will be renouncing our position as men who love civilization,” he once said.
For 8,000 years Indigenous communities had chewed coca leaves. But 20th-century elites in Lima—like the Spanish conquistadors when they first arrived on the continent—identified coca chewing as culturally and spiritually integral to a way of life different from their own.
“The consumption of coca, illiteracy, and a negative attitude to the superior culture are closely intertwined,” said a 1947 report by the Peruvian education ministry.
This spurred the United Nations to dispatch a team of supposed experts to investigate the “coca-chewing problem” two years later, leading the international body to demand the “suppression” of coca cultivation to eradicate a “social evil.”
A global ban on chewing it was implemented through the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1964, leaving coca under such a restrictive drug control regime that researchers even today often find it impossible to source the understudied leaves.
Similar paternalistic calls would attempt to justify the later global drug war. But 75 years on from the UN’s first diktats on coca, the organization’s health authority is set to publish its “critical” health review of the evidence underpinning the Schedule I status of the mildly stimulating, medicinal plant—rich in calcium and iron—after requests from Bolivia and Colombia to end its international prohibition.
Indigenous advocates have been prominent in building momentum for those countries—coca is already legal in Bolivia; in Colombia, consumption is only permitted within Indigenous communities—to make that request. “This is a David and Goliath battle against colonialism,” David Curtidor, director of indigenous-owned coca beer company Coca Nasa, told the Times of London in September. “We’re saying enough is enough.”
Colombian botanist Óscar Pérez, of Kew Gardens, sees coca as the world’s most misunderstood plant. “It is not fair that the coca plant is so demonized,” he told América Futura in November. “In European countries, especially in the Schengen area, all coca species are classified as illegal, even if it is not known whether they are used to produce cocaine. In fact, I couldn’t take a leaf from here to do research. It’s ridiculous.”
But change may be on the horizon. The WHO review could potentially lead the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to recommend a reduction in the classification of coca, from which both cocaine and Coca-Cola derive key ingredients, under drug control treaties—or even decriminalization.
“The views in the past that led to coca’s current classification are indefensible on the basis of today’s scientific, ethical and legal standards.”
“This is the coca leaf,” Bolivia’s representative to the UN, Diego Pary, said in November at the UN in New York, holding one aloft from a pile in front of him, just like former president Evo Morales did in the conference hall in 2013. But unlike Morales, Pary then put the leaf into his mouth.
“We remove the stem, and chew the leaf, and we put it to the side of our cheek,” he said, demonstrating.
“We need to demystify all of the narratives that have been developed over the years about the coca leaf,” Pary added. “The Indigenous communities recognize the coca leaf not just as a plant but as a means of spiritual connection that allows them to be in harmony with nature and their ancestors.”
The World Health Organization has three most likely options: Conclude that the coca leaf should remain in Schedule I, recommend transfer to the less-restricted Schedule II or recommend the removal of coca from the treaty schedules altogether.
“The views in the past that led to coca’s current classification are indefensible on the basis of today’s scientific, ethical and legal standards,” Martin Jelsma, a program director at the Transnational Institute, a progressive think tank, told Filter. “If the WHO fails to call for a change, the agency risks losing credibility with regard to fulfilling its treaty mandate objectively and showing respect for Indigenous rights.”
Governments defending the status quo, he added, fear that changing the status of the coca leaf could become a precedent for questioning the classification of several other drugs, marking the beginning of the end of the global prohibition regime. “There is much at stake and the coca review will be a hot topic in UN corridors this whole year.”
“We are convinced that coca-leaf chewing is a social evil; the chronic consumption of these leaves constitutes a social poison.”
Back in 1949, after the UN dispatched its team to investigate, the mission leader immediately revealed the agenda at an airport press conference. Howard Fonda, who was also vice president of the American Pharmaceutical Association, claimed that coca chewing was not only “definitely harmful and deleterious” but “the cause of racial degeneration of many population groups.”
“Our studies will confirm the truth of our statements, and we hope to be able to submit a rational plan of action … to secure the total eradication of this pernicious habit,” he said.
The subsequent 1950 UN Commission on the Enquiry of the Coca Leaf report recommended the “suppression” of coca use. Psychiatrist and criminologist Pablo Osvaldo Wolff, who worked on the report, later became head of the WHO’s Expert Committee on Addiction-Producing Drugs. He characterized people who chew coca as “abulic, apathetic, lazy, insensitive [and] befogged.”
A 1952 WHO paper later said: “We are convinced that coca-leaf chewing is a social evil; the chronic consumption of these leaves constitutes a social poison which undermines the physical and mental health of the population and lowers its moral and economic level.”
Coca is not just of spiritual importance to Andean people but integral to their diet, which traditionally lacks a calcium-rich dairy source, Davis added.
Initiatives to control coca cultivation were subsequently attempted, but not on any historically significant scale. Yet the groundwork for the systematic and destructive, US-funded coca eradication campaign that would arrive in the 1980s had been laid, before the anti-drug campaign hugely exacerbated the civil war in Colombia.
Over several decades, more than 260,000 people were killed with 7 million forced from their homes. The US pumped a trillion dollars into the drug war, and plenty of it ended up enriching Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian elites to the detriment of others.
“Most Colombians have never seen, let alone used, cocaine and there they suffered a real war on drugs,” anthropologist Wade Davis told Filter. Davis told the history of coca in his bestselling 1996 book One River, in part leading him to be made an honorary citizen of Colombia in 2018. “I think what keeps the market going is the money, not the lousy drug.”
Coca, on the other hand, is not just of spiritual importance to Andean people but integral to their diet, which traditionally lacks a calcium-rich dairy source, added Davis, who worked on a 1975 nutritional study of the coca leaf at Harvard’s Botanical Museum.
“What we found absolutely horrified our backers at the US government,” he told the recent UN meeting. “Turns out, coca was chock-full of vitamins, [and] has more calcium than any other plant ever studied by science, which made it perfect for a diet that traditionally lacked a dairy product.”
“Compared with an average of ten cereals, coca was higher in protein, fat, fiber, ash, calcium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin A, riboflavin, and vitamin C,” the 1975 study found.
“There is precedent within the treaties for having the plant versions of drugs unscheduled, whereas the extracted drugs are scheduled.”
All of this will be considered by the WHO, though it is unlikely to assess the potential harm reduction role of coca. Small numbers of people experiencing addiction to powder or crack cocaine have found benefit in using coca as a safer alternative, and many more could be ushered toward it through legalization.
At the Taki Wasi retreat center in Tarapoto, Peru, people with substance use disorders are treated with coca leaves as part of a wider rehabilitation regimen including other Amazonian psychoactive plants. “Coca provides balance, stimulates dream production; it is a toner, it also calms physical and emotional pain, it allows wounds to heal,” wrote founder Dr. Jacques Mabit. “It allows [you] to focus and align on all levels.”
The WHO review will not lead to any reexamination of the laws governing the use of cocaine, though there are growing calls for a legal, regulated market in the face of global demand that fuels violence over control of the trade and incentivizes production of riskier versions of the drug. The gains of any policy liberalization would include economic benefits to Andean communities.
“There is precedent within the treaties for having the plant versions of drugs unscheduled, whereas the extracted drugs are scheduled,” Steve Rolles, a senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a think tank in the United Kingdom, told Filter.
Rolles has been campaigning for a legal, regulated market for cocaine that could include milder forms of the drug in gum, lozenge and snus-like forms. If the WHO’s coca health-risk evaluation were “meaningful and honest,” he added, “coca would be removed from the schedules altogether.”
Even if the WHO does recommend rescheduling, however, Rolles envisages the US and the other prohibitionist countries would rally sufficient support to vote against it at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. “Any change in scheduling of coca leaf would be seen as a threat to sort of drug-war norms around cocaine and crack.”
Meanwhile decocainized energy drinks have been hitting shelves, and one brand is even sponsoring the US National Lacrosse League. “As the first company outside Coca-Cola to legally manufacture and distribute coca extracts globally on a commercial scale, we’re redefining its role in the modern world,” said Pat McCutcheon, CEO of Power Leaves Corp. “By working hand-in-hand with Indigenous communities, we aim to expand global access to coca’s benefits while preserving its cultural heritage.”
“The natural coca leaf is like a dry seal that protects the identity of the Andean-Amazonian ancestral peoples.”
Aside from the WHO review, momentum for reform is growing. Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, spoke at a high-level side event on coca in March 2024, which was also organized by Bolivia and Colombia—with support from Canada, Czechia, Malta, Mexico and Switzerland.
“Indigenous Peoples have been overpoliced on practices such as subsistence cultivation of drug crops—crops which may be used as traditional medicines, which are essential to their lives and livelihoods, and which hold deep cultural and spiritual significance,” Türk said.
In February, the nonprofit McKenna Academy, in collaboration with Davis, will host a multidisciplinary summit on coca just outside Cusco, Peru, called The Wisdom of the Leaf. Bolivian Vice President David Choquehuanca will speak at the event in support of legalization.
“The natural coca leaf is like a dry seal that protects the identity of the Andean-Amazonian ancestral peoples,” Choquehuanca told the UN in April. “The truth that the coca leaf is not a drug is gradually coming to the surface of the collective consciousness.”
Photograph of coca field in Bolivia by kristin miranda via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
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